adj loopy; nuts. A fairly light-hearted term for someone who’s losing their marbles a bit. Brits do also share the American meaning, where it refers to a plastic child’s toilet bowl. Not that plastic children probably ever need the toilet.
The Letter P
adj crappy; third-rate. Presumably derived in some way from when horrible things were described as being ridden with a pox.
n baby carriage. An abbreviation for the rather Victorian and now largely unused term “perambulator.”
n fender-bender. An event towards the more sedate end of car accidents – you’re unlikely to hear on the news that fourteen people were killed in a multi-car prang and ensuing fireball on Wednesday evening.
n idiot: I met my sister’s boyfriend the other day and he seems like a complete prat. Derived from a time when the word was slang for your posterior (in a similar way to the more contemporaneous “arse”) from whence, interestingly, came the peculiarly American word “pratfall” (a fall on one’s behind).
n a school-child who, having done particularly well academically or on the sports field, is allowed to perform such glorious tasks as making sure everyone behaves properly in the lunch queue, tidying up after school events and showing new pupils around at the weekends. As you may have guessed, I was never a prefect. Bitter? Me?
n anchor (the person, not the nautical device). In the U.K., presenters of news programmes are known as presenters rather than “anchors.” Likewise, the Brits have co-presenters instead of “co-anchors,” a term which almost caused my boss to regurgitate his drink during a U.S. business trip when he heard it as “co-wanker.”
n bar. An abbreviation for “public house.” However, in my experience, British pubs are generally far more sociable than American bars. While you would go into a pub to have a pleasant lunch with your family or one or two sociable beers with a couple of friends, you’d only go into a bar in order to get blind drunk and then start a fight or have sex with something.
n I wrote a whole chapter about this earlier on, and I’m not writing it again. It begins on page 21.
n dessert: If you keep spitting at your grandfather like that you’re going to bed without any pudding! Brits do also use the word in the same sense as Americans do (Christmas pudding, rice pudding, etc). The word “dessert” is used in the U.K. but really only in restaurants, never in the home. To complicate things further, the Brits have main meal dishes which are described as pudding – black pudding and white pudding. These are revolting subsistence foods from the dark ages made with offal, ground oatmeal, dried pork and rubbish from the kitchen floor. The difference between the black and white puddings is that the black one contains substantial quantities of blood. This, much like haggis, is one of those foodstuffs that modern life has saved us from but that people insist on dredging up because it’s a part of their “cultural heritage.” Bathing once a year and shitting in a bucket was a part of your cultural heritage too, you know. At least be consistent.
interj the genuine article; good stuff: I was a bit dubious when they were selling Levis for twenty quid, but I reckon they’re pukka. It is derived from the Hindi word “pakka,” meaning “substantial,” and made it to the U.K. via the Colonies.
v hook up. The art of attracting the opposite sex: You’re not going to pull with breath smelling like that. on the pull a less proactive version of “sharking.” Single males and females are almost all on the pull but will deny it fervently and pretend to be terribly surprised when eventually it pays off.
n gym shoes. A rather antiquated term. The confusion arises because in the U.S., it means high heels or stilettos.
1 n flat tire. In the U.K., puncture is used to describe the offending tire itself rather than just the hole in it: We had to pull over because we got a puncture. 2 infraction (universal).
n guy. A punter is usually a customer of some sort (the word originally meant someone who was placing bets at a racecourse), but this need not be the case. Because of the word’s gambling roots, punters are regarded slightly warily and shouldn’t necessarily be taken at face value: When I came out of the tube station there was some punter there saying his car had broken down and he needed five quid to put petrol in it. Because American Football isn’t very popular in the U.K., Brits are unaware of the role of a punter on a football team (though they do share the everyday definition of the word “punt”).
n money-purse. A little bag that women generally keep money in. Brits call anything larger than a money-purse a “handbag.”
n baby buggy; stroller. A device in which a small child is pushed along by an obliging parent. The American term “buggy” is squeezing its way into everyday use in the U.K.
v put an end to: We were going to have a picnic in the park but the weather put paid to that.